In recent years, social media services such as Twitter™, Digg™, Myspace™ and Facebook™ have seen a meteoric rise in popularity resulting in an ever evolving universe of streaming content/data which is often user/consumer generated. Thus, social media is able to capture, better than many other sources, a raw and unfiltered pulse of society.
Potential applications for data harvested from social media are vast. For example, from a marketing intelligence standpoint, a company may gather and analyze information relevant to the company's markets to promote accurate and confident decision-making in determining market opportunity, market penetration strategy, market development metrics, etc.